Fabrication on the micron, sub-micron and nano scales are becoming increasingly important to both scientific research and industrial applications such as electronic devices, photovoltaic cells, optoelectronics, and microelectromechanical (MEM) systems. There are a number of emerging technologies such as metamaterials, photonic wave-guides, nano-imprint lithography (NIL), field emission devices, and through silicon via (TSV) that require high resolution and high aspect ratio nanofabrication techniques for good performance. Unfortunately, current nanofabrication techniques, including wet chemical methods utilizing potassium hydroxide (KOH), sodium hydroxide (NaOH), etch stops, and buffered oxide etchs (BOE) or dry chemical methods utilizing such methods as plasma etching, deep reactive ion etching, and ion etching suffer from undercuts, scalloped edges and/or undercuts, crystallographic dependencies and are limited to low aspect ratios on the order of 7:1. Deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) is generally used to create structures with aspect ratios of around 10:1 under general conditions; however the process leaves rough scalloped side walls that can limit device efficiency.